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He studied classical and modern philosophy in Klagenfurt, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and received his PhD in Cultural Theory from the Humboldt University, Berlin. Since 1984 he has worked as a free-lance journalist and writer. Buden regularly publishes essays in German, English and French on philosophical, political, and cultural subjects pertaining to the former Yugoslavia, western Europe and the United States of America in such journals as Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Gesellschaftskritik, Literatur und Kritik, and the Vienna cultural magazine Springerin. In addition to his activities as a journalist Buden has made a name as a translator of Freud into Croatian. As an activist in the Yugoslavian peace movement he founded in 1993 the journal Arkzin, a cultural-political and social-critical publication devoted to international literature, art, pop culture and the new media. In addition, he is the founder and chief editor of Bastard Publishing Co. In 1998 it published the first Croatian new edition of the Communist Manifesto with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek. Buden's political activism has born fruit as a volume of essays that appeared as Barricades I and Barricades II.

Central to Buden's writing is the concept of a culturally-politically divided Europe: post-communist eastern Europe is regarded as an outsider and "bastard" of the European Union. In its exclusion, however, Buden sees the chance to define anew the universal appeal of west-European culture, for "this universal is not being reconfigured along the dividing line drawn between cultural identities, and even less upon the bulwark of multiculturalism which only freezes the existing relations, but rather it is being expressed on the barricades upon which, after all that has happened, it was born in a political and historical sense." (Based on source).